An Extension of Complex Role Inclusion Axioms in the Description Logic SROIQ

Abstract

We propose an extension of the syntactic restriction for complex role inclusion axioms in the description logic SROIQ. Like the original restriction in SROIQ, our restrictions can be checked in polynomial time and they guarantee regularity for the sets of role chains implying roles, and thereby decidability for the main reasoning problems. But unlike the original restrictions, our syntactic restrictions can represent any regular compositional properties on roles. In particular, many practically relevant complex role inclusion axioms, such as those describing various parthood relations, can be expressed in our extension, but could not be expressed in the original SROIQ.